New development: Learning communities—an approach to dismantling barriers to collective improvement

IMPACT

Financial, performance and workload pressures on public services are increasing. Methods which enable practitioners to pool together and reflect on ‘practical wisdom’ to make better decisions in the navigation of complexity have the potential to improve the practitioner and service user experience and enable more effective targeting of resource-intensive interventions. This article contributes to the improved understanding of the practicalities, limitations and opportunities of surfacing and sharing tacit knowledge in the public sector environment. It will be of value to healthcare and social care practitioners, commissioners, service managers, educationalists and organizational development leads.

ABSTRACT

Public services operate in conditions of complexity. Practitioners and service users can never be certain of the impact or outcome of a course of action and, consequently, responsible failure must be supported. A new methodology for enabling public service professionals to navigate the complexity of their practice is introduced in this article: ‘learning communities’ (LCs). Drawing from developmental applications of this methodology, the authors describe how LCs provide environments for talking authentically about uncertainties and mistakes with the purpose of collective improvement, and draw parallels with similar methods of community co-creation. The way that LCs tackle two key elements of the public sector’s learning capacity noted in the literature—structure and culture—is explained.

KEYWORDS:

• Accountability
• action-orientated learning
• complexity
• improvement
• learning communities
• organizational learning
• public sector
• reflective practice
• reflexivity

Acknowledgement

The Learning Community Facilitator Development Programme was funded by an impact acceleration award from the ESRC, hosted by Newcastle University’s Centre for Knowledge, Innovation, Technology and Enterprise (KITE).